Faculty Teaching Excellence Program

FACING FACEBOOK: LEVERAGING LAPTOPS AND OTHER PORTABLE DEVICES IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION CLASSROOM

Diane Sieber, Professor of Humanities

What are they doing on their laptops? E-mailing, instant messaging, Face booking, blogging, tagging, shopping, online gaming? Often, instructors don’t know, though they suspect. Rather than ban laptops from the classroom in order to eliminate these distractions, or change teaching methods in order to compete, faculty have begun to explore methods of leveraging ubiquitous computing in the classroom. Beyond googlejockeying (assigning students to find out facts from the internet), faculty are developing options for use in different disciplines, with different class sizes, and under different teaching circumstances. This session will introduce approaches to meeting the challenge of our always-on wireless culture. From social contracts to free simultaneous feedback software, from the new pedagogical to focused peer-learning experiments, there are many opportunities to turn a potential obstacle into an excellent avenue for effective teaching and learning.

This event will be held in ATLAS 200.